Logged into my Flowroute account to recharge my balance and noticed a notification alerting me to their "new Edge POP strategy" with a link to their blog: https://blog.flowroute.com/2018/05/14/flowroute-adds-4-new-pops-points-of-presence-in-the-u-s/
Seems they've added POPs in SEA, PDX, EWR, and IAD. They run on "modern cloud infrastructure," in comparison to their legacy pops (in LAS and LAX), which I guess don't. :P (The webinar mentioned that the legacy ones are more tied to TDM/PSTN technologies and can't be upgraded/expanded as fast.)
The legacy ones are still live (for now), but in order to "take advantage" of the new ones, you have to manually set a preferred POP and then muck around in the config to direct your routes to specific POPs and then change your trunk settings to connect to a specific POP. That sort of dilutes one of my big positive impressions about Flowroute over VoIP.ms in that it just works with DNS SRV magically handling load balancing and failover and everything; while they do claim that they do (limited regional) failover on the new POPs, it isn't nearly as point-and-click as the current legacy platform. (VoIP.ms's single-server-point-of-failure network set-up is my main reason I don't use them for anything mission-critical.)
I had to chuckle at the claim that the new servers run on "modern cloud infrastructure" is a feature. I generally shy away from cloud-provider-based set-ups for VoIP, because cloud providers can't really guarantee instance or network performance. (That's one reason why I chose to host with RentPBX and not just run an Amazon instance for my PBX.) That said, I do have friends who run PBXs on Amazon and it seems to work fine, so maybe I'm just becoming a curmudgeon (get off my digital lawn!) in my old age.
Anyway, not that it much matters for me right now, because my call volume is small and they do direct media anyway (so a handful of milliseconds shaved off of the SIP call-set-up traffic is really not even noticeable), but I'm wondering if I should go ahead and "take advantage" (a word they overuse in their webinar) of the new set-up or just wait and let the dust settle for a bit. My PBX is collocated in ORD, so I'm thinking I'll at least wait until they go live with central region servers later this year before messing around with it.
It'd be nice if they could just let me keep all my current settings and continue directing my registrations at sip.flowroute.com and then just transparently and automagically handle everything (ideally DNS SRV routing me to their future midwest server based on my location) as they change their network around, but failing that development, I guess I do eventually need to do something if they do end up sunsetting their current legacy set-up.
Thoughts?
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